In roughly 12 hours I’m off to the airport to attend Drilling Down on Local ‘07.

I will try to blog about anything interesting I learn, but we will see how long I can stand my tablet [I did buy an external keyboard + mouse for it]

The beauty of having data is once you know what to do with it, you can get it done fast.

So I spend a few hours whipping up a quick and easy mashup of restaurants + mapping. Basically pop in an address or move around the map, and it will show you the 30 closest restaurants.

I do want to add that the Explorer actually uses our own in-home geocoder solution (which we will be releasing ’soon’).

Of course, extending this to any other category/categories would take all of 5 minutes.

I plan on releasing the code so anyone can see how it was done … but right now, the conference is around the corner.

UPDATED: Just noticed it doesn’t always work in IE - some little JS bug. Will fix it later on. Try this link for now: restaurants near 91101. And if entering an address, click on ‘Center’ (dont press Enter).

Yeah yeah, it is just a quick prototype!

Remember this post on Google Sitemaps? It turned out that while Google downloaded the main sitemap file, it hadn’t downloaded the others. Instead of saying ‘wait up we are still downloading them’, it simply threw out ‘Errors.’

That earlier link was also before had finished geocoding everything. And with the updated sitemap ready, the # of pages ended up: 21,292,229

Anyone know of a bigger sitemap?

All about iBegin Source:

1. Focus on local data. The competitors talk about businesses, consumers, mailing lists, and so forth. We are just about business data. Nothing more, nothing less.
2. Nothing to hide. Company X can claim 14,000,000 records - but how can you be sure the data is any good? We have opened up our data for everyone to see.
3. It is an open system. Are we missing a business? Add it in under a minute. Do we not have a URL that we should? Edit it and be done in 15 seconds flat.
4. Cheap. Did I say cheap? I meant really cheap. Other companies try to charge you above $500,000. Not a single company charges under $100,000.
5. No pushy sales team. No need to fill out a ‘quote request’ or go through a ’sales specialist’ trying to wring every single penny out of you. Simple automated-system
6. Already geocoded. Geocoding over 10 million addresses is not a cheap endeavor. Does anyone else offer it? Nope.
7. No extra charges. Daily, weekly, and monthly updates are available at no extra cost. The other providers? Get ready to pay more. Popular site? You pay extra based on how popular your site is.
8. We support web standards. From hCard to WCAG Accessibility to the interestingly named ‘ICBM’ meta tag, we support it.
9. Trackback system for automated updates to us. No data-provider lets you send them updates. We want those updates - send them to us.
10. Free download (non-commercial). Yes we had to remove phone numbers. And yes it isn’t geocoded. But no one else lets you download information on over 10,000,000 US businesses without paying a dime.
11. Expanding soon. We are only in the US right now, but in the upcoming months we are expanding worldwide, including to countries like Canada, the UK, New Zealand, and more.
12. Use the data forever. Other data brokers make you pay a yearly fee (just to use the data) - not us.
13. Franchises galore. We have created a system in extracting information on over a million franchise locations in the US.
14. Experience. Unlike the other companies, we use the data ourselves for a local search site. We know what works, and what doesn’t.
15. Not publicly mentioned, but once we see some interesting non-commercial applications, we intend on giving them a commercial license for free.

And because you want to: Digg This

Yep, it is finally here - iBegin Source.

I will be adding a post soon about ‘15 things iBegin Source does better’ soon.

And because you want to: Digg This

Note: Locking this thread for comments, add your comments to the 15 things iBegin Source does better post.

American Capital just plunked 160 million into GeoSign. This wasn’t a purchase - it was an investment.

GeoSign is one of my favorite companies on the internet. I ran across them roughly two years, but really got to know what they were upto about a year ago. They do domains (owning fantastic domains like GolfCourses.com and Hockey.com), they do content (a ton of writers/editors), and they do local search (TrueLocal). Take my company, giantize it by a factor of roughly 15, and you have GeoSign

As a follow up Frank has an interview with Tim Nye, GeoSign founder.

This likely won’t make the news on sites like TechCrunch or Read/Write, but this is a significant investment. GeoSign is a strong company, claiming over 35 million unique visitors a month. And since I highly doubt they gave up more than 50%, we can say that this investment values the company at over $300,000,000. In seven years, Tim has taken the company from nothing to such a valuation. Kudos to that success.

I can only guess what they are going to do with that money.

When it comes to the US, Yahoo! Local is by far the best site. As I outlined in my previous post about scrubbing local data, they have taken extra steps to make sure their data is accurate and clean. They have a ton of data and information - from local reviews to web-results to even extra information gleaned from sources like Delicious.

Yet dammit to hell, they have by far the most complex interface I have ever come across. Eg I was looking at this listing for Chipotle Mexican Grill. What do I see on the top:

Save to Collection | Save to My Web | Send to Phone | Add to Address Book | Email to Friend | Print

Someone tell me the inherent difference between ‘Collection’, ‘My Web’, and ‘Address Book’. Not only is the ‘Collection’ link on top, but also on the side.

Of course, at the same time Yahoo! is trying to convince me to read a review, to rate it, to edit it, to map it (whats that on my right), to get directions, to see a larger map, show various things, save to my collection, write a review, see Donny O’s reviews, (boldfaced) write a review, search the web (even with web references), a link to alternatives (with a list of alternatives right under neath it too), a plug for Yahoo! Answers, and then … way on the bottom (building value for advertisers) … the category sponsors.

And then those damn links again.

I feel a headache coming on …

I partook in a small but interesting discussion a while ago about how bad local data is out there. Not just bad, but also impossible to clean up.

I’ve been taking the time lately to go back through iBegin and ’scrub’ our data. As it happens, the raw data we purchase is far from perfect (duplicates galore, mis-categorizations, etc). It is essentially a ‘risk’ we take. But that isn’t the end of it - even franchises suffer from big problems when it comes to local data.

Case in point: McDonald’s. You cannot get a more recognizable name. But do note its name - McDonald + ‘ + s. Not McDonalds, not Mc Donalds, not MacDonalds, or the other dozens of varieties.

So while we went through, pass-by-pass (basically you create rules, ‘run’ the rules on the data, tweak the rules, and then re-run) through our data, I wondered what my esteemed competition was upto.

Looks like not much. Checking them out:

• InsiderPages. IP couldn’t even handle the single-quote. It did local McDonald’s, so I guess we give it a pass
• Yelp. I found McDonalds, McDonald’s, McDonalds Restaurant, and other variations. A few of the clickable links had a link to the official website, but most did not.
• Google Maps. A bigger mashup than all the rest combined. No standardized name (Whats a Restrnt), some are categorized, most aren’t. No link to the official website.
• TrueLocal. A few results, various spellings, no link to the official site except for the first link. Interestingly if you click on the first result, it shows you many more McDonald’s listings. Those are accurate, but why aren’t they in the default search results?
• Yahoo Local. Correctly spelled and all results link to the main website. Perfect

Really my point here (amidst the connections in my brain) is that if companies cannot even get the data on the largest franchise in the world right, how are they going to cover data on small businesses?

Its a mind-boggling problem.

Andy Sack, the blogging CEO of Judy’s Book posted today about what Yelp did to whip Judy’s Book. Because lets be fair - it was a whipping.

Three main points, each very interesting on its own:

Catered to a younger audience
While this is an easier route, it means some heavy skewing. And you can already see the effects of that. A lot of the reviews are written specifically to get ‘coolpoints’. A lot of the reviews read like stories, of which 1% can be considered a ‘review’ and the other 99% a journey of epic proportions. The other issue at hand is the fickleness of that crowd. Friendster felt it, and everyone is wondering if Facebook is going to feel it. Then again, maybe it is only the younger crowd that will ever really contribute (in large masses) to sites like Yelp. This isn’t to rag on Yelp, just that I think that strategy can be dangerous. But it might be the only one.

Focused on restaurants
This just makes sense. There is no activity (outside of their house) that a person does that is more varied than eating out. You can find a favorite cafe. A favorite club. But even with a favorite restaurant - you look. You flirt, and you tempt. We can have a monogamous relationship with almost anything (again applying to outside of the house) except eating at a restaurant.
So umm - back to the topic. More than Yelp being smart, I have to ask - what the hell was the competition doing? Catering to plumber reviews?

Out-marketed
This is where Yelp does deserve its dues. The site is exceptionally well put together, and has great cheeky humor spread throughout the site. Judy’s Book felt motherly, Insider Pages felt corporate, and Yelp felt friendly. Well done Yelp, well done!

Andy’s final point is interesting - can Yelp (or InsiderPages or anyone else for that matter) properly monetize social directories? Personally - I don’t see why not. If MySpace or Facebook (Friendster is suppoused to break even within the next few months) can do it, why not Yelp or IP? The audience at MySpace is highly fragmented and relatively cash-poor. The people on Yelp are local (and thus far better targeted) and are interested in going out (and spending their relatively cash-rich wallets). Someone give me a good counter-argument.

Then again, our own iBegin is trying to be search-first, social-network second. That in itself is a different ballpark, with headaches galore. I will talk about some of the challenges in upcoming posts.

So today (last night for me) Boorah launched, a site I had recently pointed out was cached all over Google and had its blog broken. We don’t see many (credible) local search sites launched anymore, so lets take a gander with some few thoughts:

1. The design is ugly. If it was slightly uglier, you could give Craigslist a run for that money
2. Clicking on basic search brought me to this page - huh?
3. Having never lived in NYC or SF, I am unfortunately unable to ascertain the strength of its results …
4. The assortment of reviews is pretty cool. I do *not* like how they use redirect links (dammit if you are going to essentially lift content, give it a damn direct link). It also makes no sense how they are ordering the reviews - definitely not based on date.
5. Because they give no breakdown of information on the reviews, their overall rankings for food, ambiance, and service could be made up. No proof, not good enough.
6. The design is seriously horrible. I say this after clicking on add tags - the inline dialog box looks like its from Mac OS X. Someone point them to 37signals asap-like.
7. The Buzz is really just # of reviews. Why call it Buzz?
8. Whats open now is busted for me. It showed places opening up at noon in SF (and one hour ahead of SF, it is 8:57 am locally).
9. The smart search is cool but busted. Searching for ‘open kitchen’ brought in results for lively also. Clicking on the links didn’t work - dead links.
10. ‘People who liked this restaurant also liked …’ is pretty damn cool. Again, since I don’t know these places, I cannot reflect on its accuracy.
11. The speed of search (which matters a lot to me) is too slow.
12. The ‘blog link’ on the bottom goes to http://www.boorah.com/blog/. How about someone do some cleanup and point the other two blog URLs to the correct one.

I like the idea, but I am not impressed with the execution. Too many odd bugs - if I found all those in 20 minutes, they need a QA team (or a QA part-time-person) asap.

My feeling? A tech play that will try to get snapped up like OpenList.